Evidence

Mary Oliver is one of America's best-loved poets. Her luminous poetry celebrates nature and beauty, love and the spirit, silence and wonder, extending the visionary American tradition of Whitman, Emerson, Frost and Emily Dickinson.

Winner of a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, she has lived for many years on Cape Cod. Her extraordinary poetry is nourished by her intimate knowledge and minute daily observation of the New England coast, its woods and ponds, its birds and animals, plants and trees.

In her latest collection, Evidence, Mary Oliver delves even deeper than she has in the past into the mysteries of life, love and death. Exploring the evidence presented to us daily by the natural world, Oliver offers poems of arresting beauty and insight, inspired by Wordsworth's lines: "To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." Never shy of letting the power of an image lie in unadorned language, Oliver's work here reflects on the power of love and the great gifts of the natural world. In 'There Are a Lot of Mockingbirds in This Book' she writes: "but this isn't nature where the sweetest things, being hidden in leaves and thorn-thick bushes reveal themselves rarely ñthis is a book of the heart's rapture, of hearing and praisingÖ"

"These are life-enhancing and redemptive poems that coax the sublime from the subliminal."Sally Connolly, Poetry

"Mary Oliver's exquisite nature verse, Evidence, evokes the Cape Cod I've come to love and see through her eyes."Philip Hoare, Sunday Telegraph, Books of the Year